Nearly 1 in 4 Black borrowers are denied a mortgage

Jun 19, 2024
Comparatively, 1 in 10 white borrowers are turned away.
Racial disparities in the mortgage market persist.
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"Mom, Dad, will you cosign my mortgage, please?"

Jun 10, 2024
Young adults increasingly need help from a parent, or other older adult, to buy their first home. The tough market is removing some of the stigma.
Many parents are helping their kids buy a home, which makes "it that much harder for other people to break into the housing market when they don't have that help," said Abha Bhattarai at The Washington Post.
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A tax break to encourage homeownership primarily helps the wealthy

Jun 3, 2024
Economists argue the home mortgage interest deduction doesn't really work and costs the federal government tens of billions of dollars a year.
To be eligible for the home mortgage interest deduction, a buyer would have to be among the 11% of taxpayers who itemize their returns. Above, a home for sale in Damascus, Maryland.
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More housing stock means the market may be shifting in favor of buyers

Mar 18, 2024
New home listings hit a 17-month high in February, and as more sellers sell, housing prices could flatten, says Conor Sen at Bloomberg Opinion.
"We're seeing inventory really grow off the very low levels of last year," says Bloomberg's Conor Sen. "And in a market that's very undersupplied, that's becoming a meaningful amount of inventory."
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For a couple in Maine, calling a Grange Hall home means financial freedom

Feb 23, 2024
With the goal of living mortgage-free, "I really knew that I would go anywhere and I would live in anything," Kate Mill says.
After living in Nashville, Tennessee, for 23 years, Henry Pile and Kate Mills bought this  Grange Hall in Livermore Falls, Maine.
Courtesy Henry Pile

Amid a national housing shortage, Texas is an exception

Feb 7, 2024
"This market is just really wacky right now," says Houston-based broker LaTisha Grant.
The number of homes for sale in Texas has more than doubled from its low during the pandemic.
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Why does a bank sell your mortgage?

Feb 6, 2024
Most are sold into the secondary market, which increases liquidity and makes it easier to get a mortgage at a lower interest rate.
Today, upward of 70% of mortgages are sold into the secondary market, typically bundled with others to create a mortgage-back security. It can be annoying, though, when your servicer changes.
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For public good, not for profit.

The housing sector is coming out of the doldrums. But will it keep improving through 2024?

Dec 20, 2023
We jumped into the Marketplace time machine to ask some experts how things look from next December.
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Why a 0.08% drop in the mortgage rate might seem bigger than that

Dec 15, 2023
There’s research that shows when the left-most digit of a number changes, we tend to give the change more weight.
Though rates coming down may spur some to buy, others might take it as a sign that rates will continue to fall — and wait to see how far they'll go.
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More older people are still paying off mortgages

Nov 30, 2023
New data from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies shows that a growing number of people in their 60s, 70s and 80s still have mortgage debt, and they’re carrying more of it than than previous generations did.
In 1989, just 3% of homeowners over 80 still had a mortgage. Now, nearly a third do.
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